Oceanographers from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory are in Samoa for six weeks. Before leaving shore last week the researchers blogged about an outreach event in which they helped Samoan children decorate foam busts that they will send 3 miles below the ocean’s surface and bring back as shrunken heads.
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For scientists studying the climate, clouds are tricky. They are hard to measure, and hard to model. Additionally, the recorded data about clouds only goes back to the 70’s and 80’s, except for the journals from old ships. The effects of clouds on climate change is complicated even more by dust, pollution, smoke, and other tiny particles in the air – aerosols – which interact with clouds, and climate, in a significant and complicated way.
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The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network installed a third seismograph at CenturyLink Field this week in the wake of the Seattle Seahawks win over the New Orleans Saints last weekend that provided a trial by fire of the network’s website and new monitoring tools. Before last weekend’s game, network scientists set up two near real-time seismic monitors at CenturyLink to augment data from a third seismograph about a block away.
Read more »If you’ve ever seen Jack DeLap lead a bird walk, you can’t help but feel his passion for everything avian. Watch him parse the sounds of the forest – bending his ear for the beat of a wing, squinting for each feathered clue – and it’s impossible to tell a line between work and play for him. DeLap, a University of Washington doctoral candidate at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, has been working with Professor John Marzluff for the past few years, and his dissertation research focuses on changes in Western Washington bird communities because of localized deforestation and suburban development.
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A mere glass full of water from Monterey Bay Aquarium’s 1.2 million-gallon Open Sea tank, among the 10 largest aquariums in the world, is all scientists really needed to identify the Pacific Bluefin tuna, dolphinfish and most of the other 13,000 fish swimming there. Researchers also for the first time used DNA from water samples to discern which of the species were most plentiful in the tank.
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